Free 1985 by Anthony Burgess Page B

be ignored or shaped according to the Party’s will. If the electrical supplies fail that nourish the machines of torture, what then? Is the juice, in some mystical way, still flowing? And what if the oil supplies give out?Can mind affirm that they are still there? There is no science, since the empirical process of thought has been outlawed. Technological skills are all harnessed to the making of armaments or the elimination of personal freedom. Neurologists are abolishing the orgasm, and we must assume that cognate specializations are devising other modes of killing pleasure or enhancing pain. No preventive medicine, no advances in the curing of diseases, no transplantation of organs, no new drugs. Airstrip One would be powerless to stem a strange epidemic. Of course, the decay and death of individual citizens matters little so long as the collective body flourishes. ‘The individual is only a cell,’ says O’Brien. ‘The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your finger-nails?’ Still, this vaunted control of the outside world is bound to seem impaired when incurable disease asks the mind to get out, it has outlived its tenancy of the flesh. Of course, logically bodies may disappear altogether, and Big Brother will find himself in the position of the Church Triumphant, souls or Soul static in the empyrean for ever and ever, but with no flesh to thwack or nerves to get screaming.
    Nature ignored or ill-treated has a way of expressing her resentment, as the margarine commercials used to remind us. Pollution, says the Party, does not exist. Nature will powerfully disagree. Earthquakes cannot be shrugged off with doublethink. Collective solipsism represents a hubris the gods of the natural order would be quick to punish with failed harvests and endemic syphilis. Orwell was writing at a time when the atom bomb was feared more than the destruction of the environment. Ingsoc, though, has its provenance in an even earlier time, the Wellsian one, when nature was inert and malleable and man could do with her whatever he wished.
    Even the processes of linguistic change are an aspect of nature, taking place unconsciously and, it appears, autonomously. There is no guarantee that the State’s creation of Newspeak could flourish impervious to gradual semantic distortion, vowel mutation, the influence of the richer Oldspeak of the proles. If
doubleplusungood
or, with a
Macbeth
flavouring,
doubledoubleplusungood
, is applied to an ill-cooked egg, we shall need something stronger to describe a sick headache.
Unbigbrotherwise uningsocful doubledoubledoubleplusungood
, for instance.
Bigbrotherwise
, as an intensifier, can be as neutral as
bloody
. Big Brother, being the only deity, can be invoked when we hit a thumb with a hammer or get caught in the rain. This is bound to diminish him. Pejorative semantic change is afeature of all linguistic history. But – one forgets – one is dealing with a new kind of human being and a new kind of reality. We should not strictly be speculating about something that cannot happen here.
    We must take
Nineteen Eighty-Four
not only as a Swiftian toy but as an extended metaphor of apprehension. As a projection of a possible future, Orwell’s vision has a purely fragmentary validity. Ingsoc cannot come into being: it is the unrealizable ideal of totalitarianism which mere human systems unhandily imitate. It is the metaphorical power that persists: the book continues to be an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears. But why do we have these fears? We are so damnably pessimistic that we almost want Ingsoc to happen. We are scared of the State –always the State. Why?

Cacotopia
    â€˜Wherever you are, you always have to work. There’s never any excuse for idleness. Nor are there any taverns, public houses, brothels. There are no opportunities for seduction, no places for secret meetings. Everyone has his eye on you. You not only